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Stocking The Pantry and Mise en Place

Throughout this series we have been working slowly up to being comfortable with food and cooking. We learned first how (and when) we should be eating, and then how to develop an aesthetic sense of food. That accomplished, we learned how to set up our kitchens and how to be comfortable in them by thinking like a chef does.

Last week we learned how to take all of that and start acting like a chef (well, cooking like one anyway - I’ll leave it as an exercise to figure out how to stomp around the kitchen screaming and throwing knives at busboys…)

This week, our series comes to a close, but before we are done, we have one more thing to do; we need to put some food in our kitchens! None of this is going to do us a bit of good if there isn’t any food to cook. I am not going to tell you specifically to put in your pantry, beacuse there are quite a few sites that make lists of recommended items to keep in your pantry. Here are a few:

• Saving Money in the Kitchen: Pantry List
• The Well-Stocked Pantry — A Cook’s Secret Weapon
• Teri’s Kitchen
• Basic Pantry List
• Clever Parents

Instead, I want to talk a little bit about how to think about your pantry. In a restaurant, a chef does not have to run out to the store in the middle of dinner to get more eggs, because of two things: a well stocked pantry that is tailored to what is being cooked most often, and mise en place Pronounced “MEEZ ahn plahs”, this French cooking term is by far the most important concept in all of cooking. Literally translated as “put in place” it means to have all your ingredients prepared and ready to go before you start cooking.

If you have done any cooking before now, you probably usually jump right into a recipe with little or no prep figuring you can chop the garlic while the onions are sautéing. You get 4 steps into the recipe and find you needed to reduce some balsamic vinegar before adding it to the dish and now you are scurrying around trying to get it done before the onions and garlic overcook and your timing is completely thrown off. This never happens in a restuarant, well, almost never, and the reason is mise en place.

Mise en place goes well beyond simply making sure you have all the ingredients you need. It means breaking every recipe into two completely seperate phases. Phase one is prep work. In a restaurant setting, there are cooks who do nothing but this (I was one once). They start work long before the other cooks arrive, and do all of the things that need to be done ahead of time; All the meats, chicken, and fish are cut and de boned, the fresh herbs for seasoning sauces are washed, cut, and separated into small bowls, the vegetables are sliced, diced, or julienned to the correct size, everything ready to go because when the show gets going, there is no time to go back and dice up some carrots. The show must go on.

Mise en place is also a state of mind. Think of it as the advanced version of thinking like a chef. According to The New Professional Chef, mise en place:

“means far more than simply assembling all the ingredients, pots and pans, plates, and serving pieces needed for a particular period. Mise en place is also a state of mind. Someone who has truly grasped the concept is able to keep many tasks in mind simultaneously, weighing and assigning each its proper value and priority. This assures that the chef has anticipated and prepared for every situation that could logically occur during a service period.”

Mise en place allows you to concentrate on what is important, the cooking when it is time to cook, and the chopping, boning, etc when it is time to prep. Trying to mix the two together doesn’t mean you can cook faster, it just means that you aren’t giving either part the attention it deserves.

Read the rest of this series:

• Part 1 - Scheduling
• Part 2 - Variety
• Part 3 - Moderation
• Part 4 - Being Picky
• Part 5 - Can The Canned Goods
• Part 6 - Get Your Kitchen In Order
• Part 7 - Think Like A Chef
• Part 8 - Technique
• Part 9 - Mise en Place